'Oh, my God, I'm going home!'

POWs talk about captivity

Posted: Monday, April 14, 2003

PETER BAKERThe Washington Post

NUMANIYAH, Iraq - The wrong turn happened just after dawn on a clear Sunday morning, March 23. The convoy from the Army's 507th Maintenance Company wandered by mistake into the riverfront city of Nasiriyah and suddenly it seemed to the soldiers that every Iraqi was trying to kill them.

"We got turned around and then lost and we rolled into Nasiriyah before it was secure and when we rolled in there was an ambush waiting for us," recalled Spc. Shoshana Johnson, 30, from El Paso, Texas.

The bullets and explosions came from all sides. In the swirling dust, soldiers' rifles jammed. Pfc. Patrick Miller, 23, began shoving rounds into his rifle one at a time.

Johnson was shot with a single bullet that sliced through both feet. Spc. Edgar Hernandez, 21, of Mission, Texas, was hit in the biceps of his right arm. Spc. Joseph Hudson, 23, of Alamogordo, N.M., was shot three times.

Finally, it fell to Sgt. James Riley, a 31-year-old from Pennsauken, N.J., and the senior soldier present, to surrender. "We were like Custer," he recalled Sunday, still sounding shocked. "We were surrounded. We had no working weapons. We couldn't even make a bayonet charge - we would have been mowed down. We didn't have a choice, sir."

The battle lasted about 15 minutes. Nine U.S. soldiers were dead. Those captured by the Iraqis would become the war's best-known soldiers. One, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, would be rescued from a local hospital April 2. Five others - Johnson, Hernandez, Hudson, Riley, and Miller - became prisoners of war until Sunday morning, when they were found, along with two captured crew members of an Apache attack helicopter, by U.S. Marines in a house north of Baghdad.

In their first interviews after being freed, the former prisoners described a harrowing journey. Speaking as a C-130 transport plane evacuating them from Iraq, they alternated between tears and smiles and hollow gazes.

The cooks and supply clerks and mechanics of the 507th Maintenance Company were supposed to be on a support mission. Members of the convoy still can't understand how they ventured by mistake into Nasiriyah.

"It wasn't a small ambush," Riley said. "It was a whole city. And we were getting shot from all different directions as we were going down the road - front, rear, left, right."

Outgunned and surrounded, the surviving soldiers threw down their weapons and raised their hands. Iraqi fighters thronged around them, pushing them down, kicking and beating some of them. Soon after arriving in the capital, the interrogations began.

The captives were stripped of their clothing and belongings and ordered to wear grungy, unwashed prison pajamas. The first guards were cruel and menacing, but the physical abuse largely subsided, the prisoners recalled.

The soldiers with gunshot wounds underwent surgery.

"More than once, a doctor said that they wanted to take good care of me to show that the Iraqi people had humanity," Johnson said. Asked what she thought of that now, she said, "I appreciate the care that I was given. But I also know that there was a reason behind it. They didn't give me care just for the humanity of it."

Later, two more American soldiers arrived, Chief Warrant Officers David Williams and Ronald Young, pilots of an Apache shot down March 24.

Deliverance came loudly and without warning.

"I was sitting there," Miller recalled a few hours later. "Next thing I know the Marines are kicking in the door, saying get down on the floor. They said, 'If you're an American, stand up.' We stood up and they hustled us out of there."

Johnson, mother of a girl who turns 3 next month, was overwhelmed to realize she was saved and would see her daughter again. "I broke down. I was like, 'Oh, my God, I'm going home!"'